A Question of Latitude | Page 3

with an inch of cork, and the sun strikes
through it and kills him. When Jameson came down the river from
Yambuya, the natives fired on his boat. He waved his helmet at them
for three minutes, to show them there was a white man in the canoe.

Three minutes was all the sun wanted. Jameson died in two days.
Where you are going, the sun does worse things to a man than kill him:
it drives him mad. It keeps the fear of death in his heart; and THAT
takes away his nerve and his sense of proportion. He flies into
murderous fits, over silly, imaginary slights; he grows morbid,
suspicious, he becomes a coward, and because he is a coward with
authority, he becomes a bully.
"He is alone, we will suppose, at a station three hundred miles from any
other white man. One morning his house-boy spills a cup of coffee on
him, and in a rage he half kills the boy. He broods over that, until he
discovers, or his crazy mind makes him think he has discovered, that in
revenge the boy is plotting to poison him. So he punishes him again.
Only this time he punishes him as the black man has taught him to
punish, in the only way the black man seems to understand; that is, he
tortures him. From that moment the fall of that man is rapid. The heat,
the loneliness, the fever, the fear of the black faces, keep him on edge,
rob him of sleep, rob him of his physical strength, of his moral strength.
He loses shame, loses reason; becomes cruel, weak, degenerate. He
invents new, bestial tortures; commits new, unspeakable 'atrocities,'
until, one day, the natives turn and kill him, or he sticks his gun in his
mouth and blows the top of his head off."
The Coaster smiled tolerantly at the wide-eyed eager young man at his
side.
"And you," he mocked, "think you can reform that man, and that hell
above ground called the Congo, with an article in Lowell's Weekly?"
Undismayed, Everett grinned cheerfully.
"That's what I'm here for!" he said.
By the time Everett reached the mouth of the Congo, he had learned
that in everything he must depend upon himself; that he would be
accepted only as the kind of man that, at the moment, he showed
himself to be. This attitude of independence was not chosen, but forced
on him by the men with whom he came in contact. Associations and

traditions, that in every part of the United States had served as letters of
introduction, and enabled strangers to identify and label him, were to
the white men on the steamer and at the ports of call without meaning
or value. That he was an Everett of Boston conveyed little to those who
had not heard even of Boston. That he was the correspondent of
Lowell's Weekly meant less to those who did not know that Lowell's
Weekly existed. And when, in confusion, he proffered his letter of
credit, the very fact that it called for a thousand pounds was, in the eyes
of a "Palm Oil Ruffian," sufficient evidence that it had been forged or
stolen. He soon saw that solely as a white man was he accepted and
made welcome. That he was respectable, few believed, and no one
cared. To be taken at his face value, to be refused at the start the benefit
of the doubt, was a novel sensation; and yet not unpleasant. It was a
relief not to be accepted only as Everett the Muckraker, as a
professional reformer, as one holier than others. It afforded his soul the
same relaxation that his body received when, in his shirt-sleeves in the
sweltering smoking-room, he drank beer with a chef de poste who had
been thrice tried for murder.
Not only to every one was he a stranger, but to him everything was
strange; so strange as to appear unreal. This did not prevent him from at
once recognizing those things that were not strange, such as corrupt
officials, incompetence, mismanagement. He did not need the
missionaries to point out to him that the Independent State of the
Congo was not a colony administered for the benefit of many, but a
vast rubber plantation worked by slaves to fill the pockets of one man.
It was not in his work that Everett found himself confused. It was in his
attitude of mind toward almost every other question.
At first, when he could not make everything fit his rule of thumb, he
excused the country tolerantly as a "topsy-turvy" land. He wished to
move and act quickly; to make others move quickly. He did not
understand that men who had sentenced themselves to exile for the
official